With the advent of distributed computing environments, such as the Internet, users have become accustomed to navigating through a variety of useful information sites. With the Internet, users may navigate through countless web sites. Once in a particular web site, a user may navigate through a variety of individual web pages contained in the web site, and the user may navigate through a variety of links to other web sites and other web pages imbedded in a given web site or web page. Because of the vast number of web pages and web site links that may be associated with a given web site, the overall structure of the web site may become a maze of pages and links that is difficult to understand and to navigate. This is particularly a problem when a given user is only interested in a specific navigation path that leads the user through certain pages and/or links with a given web site.
Methods have been developed for automatically diagramming a selected web site and its associated web pages and links so that a user may review a diagrammatic structure of the web site to assist the user in understanding the structure of the web site and to assist the user in subsequent navigation of the web site. Unfortunately, such automatic systems are limited to diagramming only those portions of a site that can be accessed without user interaction. For example, an automated web site diagramming system cannot navigate through a page or link requiring user input, such as a password, or user selection, such as selection or entry of a search term. If a diagram of such areas of a web site is needed by a user, then the automated diagram is of little use to the user. For example, the user may navigate a web site of a book ordering company. The particular search path used by the user for finding books of interest may require input of search terms at many levels of searching. A mapping and diagramming of the general web site structure without a mapping and diagramming of the search path followed by the user is not very useful to the user. In addition, such systems often diagram a web site according to a wider scope than is needed by the user. Such systems typically follow every web page and link that may be parsed without user interaction and are only limited by the number of links and the depth of path specified by the user. Unfortunately, the resultant diagram may give the user information that is neither required nor useful.
It is with respect to these and other considerations that the present invention has been made.